How to Start a Blog Network with Commentluv

For many bloggers, one of their eventual goals is to find methods to monetize their websites.  In most cases, bloggers eventually give up because they soon find out how challenging it actually is to generate enough traffic to make their time spent blogging worthwhile.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in discussion forums and some newer bloggers scratch their heads wondering why they’re not making more than enough money to buy a coffee with their blog site.

Some will proudly remark that they’re getting ’100 hits per day’ on their site and keep looking for new monetization methods.  In reality, a site that gets either a hundred page views or even unique visitors per day is never going to make you any money regardless of whether or not you’re using Adsense®, cost per impression (CPM), or even cost per acquisition (CPA) ads or other forms of affiliate marketing.

Over the course of time, if you’re diligent about posting quality content on a frequent basis and you spend time engaging in link building, you may either reach a point where your blog starts to take off and allow you to monetize it or you’ll hit that seemingly inevitable plateau in which your traffic seems to stagnate.

If that sounds at all familiar to you, one option is to create your own blog network.  In a previous post, I’ve detailed some of the benefits of joining a blog network.  In short, blog networks are a great way to build relationships, learn from other bloggers, and to generate more traffic for your website.

At the end of May of this year, I had the idea of starting a blog network myself.  Though your interests may vary, I chose to start a blog network in the health and fitness niche.

How to create a blog network?

One of the first key steps for starting a blog network is to find a partner in this endeavor.  For me, I’ve been playing around with blogging and chose a longtime blogger friend.  Fortunately, our strengths and weaknesses balanced out pretty well.

To be honest, I was lucky enough to leverage the popularity of my friend’s site, Health Habits. Doug, the blog author, had maintained an already active and popular site in our niche.  He’s well-versed with social media and had thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook Fans.  I know, talk about hitting the ground running.  Doug also has an engaging writing style and I’ve read his blog for the past few years.

Compared to Doug, my background was much stronger on the technical side of things such as WordPress setup, editing PHP and CSS, creating blog themes, and search engine optimization.     On the other hand, social media was definitely not my strong suit.  In that regard, it’s best if you can find a partner who balances out your own strengths and weaknesses.  At the same time, my blog, Supplement Updates, was not nearly as active in terms of comments or content compared to Health Habits.

Obviously the second step in creating a blog network is to actually build a network blog site.  For just two active bloggers, creating content to generate traffic for this site is the biggest challenge.  Fortunately, I managed to find Ann Smarty’s site, My Blog Guest, which is a great way to find guest authors to contribute content.

Finding guest bloggers takes time to build momentum.  If you put yourself in their position, most guest authors don’t want to contribute content for a new site that lacks traffic, PageRank, and any readership.  Early on, you’ll still have to write most of the initial content, but things will grow over time.

Grow Your Niche With Commentluv:

Installing CommentLuv was one of the earlier steps to make our website more interactive and to encourage our readers to share their opinions.  For our health and fitness niche, realizing the benefits of Commentluv took some work and imagination since it wasn’t well-known among bloggers in our area.  I’ve detailed some of the ideas that have helped to grow our blogging niche with Commentluv in a previous post.

Gail Gardner, from the Growmap blog, was particularly helpful in finding strategies to expand Commentluv into our niche.  In short, things were pretty slow going to start off with, but we’ve subsequently managed to get all of our member blogs to install the plugin.  Overall, it has helped to keep discussion very active at our site along with increasing traffic.

Once you’ve started a new site for your blog network, you’re now going to want to start recruiting member blogs.  Like anything else, it’s easiest to start asking other bloggers that you already know.

We found it helpful to do cross promotion at our network site along with the new member site in terms of announcements of new sites joining our network.  In many cases, this has encouraged new applicants to join our network.  Having grown our community with Commentluv and accepting guest blog posts, we started to get an increasingly large number of applicants.

How to Track Network Blog Traffic?

Tracking traffic across member sites along with the network itself is of utmost importance for selling ad space on your newly created network.  Though there are several options for this, I found the simplest and most effective option was to use Quantcast.  Quantcast is a free service that allows you to track unique visitors, visits, and page views across all member sites along with the network itself.  It’s simple to install and only requires adding a short code to each site.  There’s even a WordPress plugin that makes it a very easy installation.

Communication with member blogs and guest posters can also be done with various means.  For our network, we created a private Google Group which has facilitated communication with our members.  One of the nice features of using Google Groups is that it sends emails to all members when a new post is submitted to our Google Group site.

Submit your site to Google News?

Speaking of Google, if you’ve managed to create your blog network site and found a number of guest authors to contribute posts, you’ll want to consider submitting your site for consideration to Google News.  Of note, your site does have to publish content that fits the criteria of actual news.  No, your tips on how to lose weight or a blog about your ski trip isn’t actually news.  As well, you do need a multi author blog along with a special Google News sitemap to be eligible.

For monetization, having a blog network provides you with far more available page views–across the network instead of just a single blog.  This makes your network far more attractive to potential advertisers than a single blog site whether your goal is to sell ads directly or to join a CPM Ad network that has high minimum traffic qualifications.

Overall, these tips are a pretty good summary of my insights into starting a blog network from my experience over the past several months.  Accepting guest blog posts along with installing the Commentluv plugin have been two of the key components in growing our network and expanding our network’s reach.  Feel free to ask me questions or share your own views about blog networks.